Introduction

We are now in the 21st century, the age of weapons of mass destruction, computers, the internet, and interplanetary exploration. But when it comes to water, we still depend on natural precipitation to fill our reservoirs, lakes, rivers and aquifers, much like ancient civilizations did thousands of years ago. We may have learned how to cultivate our food, but we certainly have not yet figured out how to manufacture pure water cheaply and abundantly wherever and whenever we need and want it. That, of course is precisely what we need to make our deserts green and reduce carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, a step in the struggle to reverse global warming. It would also meet mankind’s current and future demand for water anywhere, and help prevent unnecessary wars and famine.

We live in a water world. 70% of the world’s surface is covered in water. Yet the vast majority of it – around 97% – is salt water. Another 2% is locked up in ice caps and glaciers. Only around 1% of the world’s water is fresh, and of that, humanity can only easily access about a tenth, or 0.1%. For decades, desalination and electrolysis have been considered deeply anti-environmental processes, primarily because they consume enormous amounts of energy and release huge amounts of greenhouse gases. Not necessarily.

The Concept

If we found a way to use solar energy exclusively to disassociate saltwater molecules to produce hydrogen at a profit, it would be possible to build a global infrastructure to burn the hydrogen and produce water anywhere in the world. The problem with that is that there is a net energy loss, and hence financial, associated with hydrogen production. The laws of energy conservation dictate that the total amount of energy recovered from the recombination of hydrogen and oxygen must always be less than the amount of energy required to split the original water molecule. We cannot remove this obstacle, but we can go around it by invoking other equally immutable laws:

1) Hydrogen is the lightest element in the periodic table, so light that in its gaseous form it quickly rises in the atmosphere and dissipates. This is extraordinarily useful because it means that the force required to pump gaseous hydrogen upward is minimal; it’s already headed that way.

2) In any volume of water, the ratio of hydrogen atoms to 1 molecule of water is 2:1. The mass of a mole of water molecules is 18g on average, so 2 moles of hydrogen atoms are in 18g of water. There are 3785.4g of water in a gallon (assuming the water is 39.2 degrees F), so there are 3785.4/18 = 210.3 moles of water molecules in a gallon. For every water molecule there are two hydrogen atoms giving 2 x 210.3 = 420.6 moles of hydrogen in a gallon of water. A mole is 6.023 x 10²³ atoms. So there are 420.6 x 6.023 x10²³ = 2.533 x 10²⁶ hydrogen atoms in a gallon of water. Since each mole of hydrogen atoms has a mass of 2g, there are 420.6g of hydrogen in every gallon of (rather cold) water.

In other words, 1 mole of water is 9 times heavier than 1 mole of hydrogen. It is this difference in mass that makes it possible to use gravity to not only recapture the energy loss but to actually generate a surplus, manufacture pure water, and make a profit -simultaneously. Currently, there are no known commercial facilities anywhere taking advantage of this fact.